This is my Baby Dad. The 100th anniversary of his birth is July 31, so we are wondering what we should eat to celebrate his memory. Since he grew up on the Ozark Plateau, some of the potential dishes:

–Chicken-fried steak. I haven’t had chicken-fried steak in thirty-five years. The last time I tried it, it was so good that I only noticed momentarily that my arteries were slamming shut like the WalMart electric doors at closing time Black Friday.

–Ham-hocks and Lima beans. Nope. Lima beans are the only culinary abomination I find more disturbing than kale. Their interiors have the texture of beach sand and taste the same. Lima beans deserve to be extinct, like Dodo birds and Tea Party Republicans. Kale, by the way, reminds me of concertina wire.

–Squirrel stew. Not bad. A little peppery when Dad made it, about as bony as a Lake Trout but darker and more mysterious in flavor. Not for me: The squirrels around here, I assume, are all rabid and homicidal. The ones who aren’t carry the Plague bacillus.

–Missouri fried chicken. Not as batter-y as Southern Fried chicken. Dust it with either corn meal or flour, add Secret Spices, fry, inhale. Grandma Gregory’s Missouri fried drumsticks were divine, so good that we almost forgot she used to absently whack us with her cane. She’d been a country schoolteacher, you see, and whacking then was what refer to now as “Classroom Management.”

–A full-out Ham Dinner, with accompaniments, but it requires a table at least twelve feet long. And an immensity of hams. Fruit salad, potato salad, hot German potato salad, jello salad, macaroni salad, mounds of deviled eggs, cinnamoned yams grown in the Old Confederacy but invaded by melting Yankee marshmallows, biscuits smeared generously with butter melted in honey, string-bean casserole, mashed potatoes that remind you of fluffy clouds–if we could somehow get butter up there–and so many pies that another table is required just for them: Sweet potato pie, pumpkin pie, Dutch apple pie, chocolate pie, lemon meringue pie, peach pie and, most of all, pecan pie, with the “can” in “pecan” pronounced the way you’d pronounce it in the term “tin can.”

Also, the emphasis is emphatic on the first syllable in the words “July” and “insurance” and you go to see a movie at the “thee-AY-ter.”

In defense of the Ozark Plateau, a meal like this Meal of Many Hams is intended to reinforce ideals like Family and Community, and it’s eaten in several shifts that are interspersed with funny stories, family stories, local scandals, livestock inspection–Ozarkers love horses, and love commenting on them, as much as County Wicklow Irish do–neighborhood walks to work the food off where the neighbors wave from the front porch. Afterward, for folks my age, there are pleasant naps in rockers on those front porches while the kids screamed at Badminton to the Death on the back back lawn, because yards in the Border States and the tier of states below were and are immense and fenceless. They make you wonder, with all that room and neighborly welcome, why Fort Sumter ever happened.

–Here’s the favorite potential Celebrate Dad meal so far, and it’s intended for breakfast: BISCUITS AND GRAVY, with a creamy gravy studded with nougats du pork and sided by fried (Do you notice a pattern here? Teenaged Dad brought grapefruit to some Hill People in a New Deal relief program and they tried to fry them, too) eggs and bacon. The Ozark Plateau, you may have noticed as well, is no place to be a hog. Biscuits, to be measured with calipers, must be at least four inches thick and also must be able to float effortlessly just before serving. CJ’s and Francisco’s Country Kitchen both serve up biscuits and gravy like that.

I think that’s the meal I’ll go for. Don’t tell Dr. Tackett, my cardiologist. She is, however, from Kentucky, where they eat the EXACT SAME STUFF. Dr. Tackett eats kale and might occasionally and accidentally smell a halibut if it’s served on a table at the opposite end of the restaurant. She is a much stronger person than I could ever hope to be.